Around two months ago, Damian Thompson, my friend and road dawg here in the Philippines introduced me to an app named Evernote. It changed the way I use my computer forever.
Here’s a description and accompanying picture that I stole from some place on the interwebz:
“Evernote is a suite of software and services designed for notetaking and archiving. A “note” can be a piece of formatted text, a full webpage or webpage excerpt, a photograph, a voice memo, or a handwritten “ink” note. Notes can also have file attachments. Notes can be sorted into folders, then tagged, annotated, edited, given comments, searched and exported as part of a notebook. Evernote supports a number of operating system platforms (including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Android, iOS and WebOS), and also offers online synchronization and backup services.”
If you’re anything like me and you’ve come across ‘getting things done/GTD’ apps like “things” and “Remember the Milk,” you are probably grumbling because you’ve seen it all before and don’t believe that adding extra applications and steps to your workflow is an effective way to be more productive.
All I can say to you, sir, is give Evernote a go! It’s free to use, and works on pretty much any platform you could be reading this article from. Watch the demonstration video, create a few folders and notes, clip a few online articles that you want to read later or that you can use as resources for a project your working on and definitely use it to create your to-do lists.
Come back here in 5 days and tell me that it hasn’t become one of the most useful, regularly used applications installed on your computer or mobile device. I will call you a liar. You will laugh and then wonder why you didn’t start using Evernote ages ago when that geek friend of yours told you how awesome it was.
I’ll say it again – Evernote is the shit!
Quick Update: AppSumo is giving away a bunch of free Evernote premium accounts for life. Definitely worth signing up for!
An update on my previous launch date announcement for the super secret E-commerce for small businesses SaaS (Software As A Service) project I have been building: I am a few days behind. Not to worry, I will be launching V1 this week (Friday 7th October to be exact and to put a bit of pressure on myself – 12pm whatever time zone the Philippines is in). I will announce it here as soon as it’s launched. Feel free to mock me for my delay in shipping using the comments below.
I’ve been using Evernote for a while and I love it for its search function. I take pictures of business cards and add them to Evernote. Evernote will search within text in an image so then all I need to do is search for a first name or company name and I get full contact info.
Another tip is that on the iPhone Evernote will geotag images. If you see a restaurant or something that you’d like to come back to later, take a picture of the sign and add it to Evernote. The next time you can’t remember where that sign was just search for a word that you know was on the sign and Evernote will tell you where you were when you took that picture. Follow the GPS back to the sign.
Ok, one more and I’ll quit. Recently, I noticed that my father had stacks of grocery store flyers (aka circulars, DMs, etc) sent to his house all the time which translated into piles of garbage. I got him to sign up for email flyers instead of paper. I showed him how to set a filter in Gmail to automatically send the flyers to Evernote. The flyer emails are usually images of the flyers so he uses Evernote to search within an image. So, for example, if he wants to buy more coffee, he simply types coffee into Evernote and he can see which store has the best sale on. A very specific example but it shows the power of Evernote.
– Matt
Some excellent tips there Matthew, thanks! That geotagging functionality and flyer search technique are great examples of innovative uses for Evernote. It amazes me how much they offer for free too, it seems that the premium edition just adds more storage space and a few unique features for power users.
Evernote IS SHIT. I was typing my contents for past 2 hours then the screen refreshed by itself and all GONE! I so deactivating and forgetting the idea of going premium. I lost all trust in Evernote. It is SHIT!